Whether winning or working, Vaughters said, the riders were united, and for Vande Velde in particular it was foundational.

"The guys were going out and throttling themselves, but they'd come onto the bus beaming with confidence like, 'We just killed these guys today,' and that confidence and spirit is what Christian just thrives on, feeling unity and team."

Garmin's success at the USA Pro Challenge is hard to overstate. It won three stages, took the overall win, and brought home two other jersey competitions (Farrar the sprint jersey, Danielson the most aggressive). It finished second on team GC. And every breakaway in the race had at least one Garmin rider in it.

Given its remarkable success in Colorado, will we see similarly aggressive tactics in other races?

“Yeah, of course,” Vaughters said. But he cautioned that it wouldn’t be a de facto strategy. “It’s harder to pull off against 190 WorldTour riders. If we tried to do the tactic we did here at the Giro d’Italia, we’d get slaughtered.”

He said that the success did make him think differently about how to use certain riders. Tom Danielson’s Stage 3 success, for example, indicated that he’s maybe one to watch for long mountain breakaways. “He’s really good when he gets his nose in the wind,” Vaughters said.

No one expected what Garmin-Sharp threw at this race, and so it seems that what we can expect in the future—more than any one thing—is something new. After this, no one will know for sure what the team has up its sleeve, and that’s exactly how Garmin wants it.